Oh, I don’t know. LOL! Look around you. Millions of Mexicans are here illegally, not only working in fields right out in the open, but as carpenters, brick layers, you name it.
And I think it would have been a little bit harder back then for the Government to have a worker go jump on ole Slue, ride around all over your county to each farm or plantation to ask for ownership papers. And how you going to prove they weren’t real papers?
Shoot, the Government revenuers couldn’t even catch half the whiskey runners, or find and shut down even half the stills. And that was years later when they had cars and a lot more gov employees. The only thing that stopped them was the end of prohibition. Just saying.
Let me ask you this then: if it would be so easy to keep slaves illegally, why didn’t the South keep the slave system up and running after the war? Why isn’t it still going in the South now? After all, if buying all the slaves and freeing them wouldn’t have prevented slavery, why did killing half a million people in a war and then freeing the slaves stop slavery?